Electronic mail, or e-mail, is routinely used for both personal and corporate communication. When sending an e-mail message to a group of recipients, the sender often has only limited information about the identity of these recipients. For example, the sender may not be aware of the corporate affiliation or the geographic location of the recipients. This is very common when “friendly names” are used in e-mail addresses, so that a user sees “John Doe” in a list rather than “john.doe@foo.com.” The problem is also made worse by the use of the “Reply to All” feature of many e-mail software programs, which allows a user to choose a group of recipients with one action, rather than choosing each one.
A sender might prefer to treat some recipients as “trusted” and others as “suspect.” For example, a corporate employee sending an e-mail message may change the message contents if the message will be received outside the company. However, conventional e-mail software programs do not readily provide this information to the user. Therefore, a need arises for these and other problems to be addressed.